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Optimized Asynchronous Passive Multi-Channel Discovery of Beacon-Enabled Networks

Neighbor discovery is a fundamental task for wireless networks deployment. It is essential for setup and maintenance of networks and is typically a precondition for further communication. In this work we focus on passive discovery of networks operating in multi-channel environments, performed by listening for periodically transmitted beaconing messages. It is well-known that performance of such discovery approaches strongly depends on the structure of the adopted Beacon Interval (BI) set, that is, set of intervals between individual beaconing messages. However, although imposing constraints on this set has the potential to make the discovery process more efficient, there is demand for high-performance discovery strategies for BI sets that are as general as possible. They would allow to cover a broad range of wireless technologies and deployment scenarios, and enable network operators to select BI's that are best suited for the targeted application and/or device characteristics. In the present work, we introduce a family of novel low-complexity discovery algorithms that minimize both the Expected Mean Discovery Time (EMDT) and the makespan, for a quite general family of BI sets. Notably, this family of BI sets completely includes BI's supported by IEEE 802.15.4 and a large part of BI's supported by IEEE 802.11. Furthermore, we present another novel discovery algorithm, based on an Integer Linear Program (ILP), that minimizes EMDT for arbitrary BI sets. In addition to analytically proving optimality, we numerically evaluate the proposed algorithms using different families of BI sets and compare their performance with the passive scan of IEEE 802.15.4 w.r.t. various performance metrics, such as makespan, EMDT, energy usage, etc.